Amazon Basics Boomboxes - The clown’s handbag

if you bought anything from amazon in the past you may be familiar with the amazon basics range i think i've purchased some amazon basics hdmi cables and perhaps some batteries but these are a little bit different we've got amazon basics boom boxes now i'm not expecting too much boom to come out of these boxes but that's what they're calling them portable stereo boom box with cd player fm radio tape deck headphone jack lcd display so that's liquid crystal display display and three and a half millimeter auxiliary input the difference between the two well the boxes are slightly differently sized from one another and this one is multi-coloured whereas that one is black but other than that the specs look much the same the designs of course are slightly different so i'm wondering if there is any difference in performance between the two and of course the prices are different but i need to go into those at the end because the prices seem to be fluctuating sometimes this one's more expensive than that one and at the moment it's that one that's more expensive than that one but let's not go into that too much at the moment let's just open these up and see how bad they are yeah i said bad because i'm not really expecting much but you know perhaps i'll be pleasantly surprised so those are the two devices side by side and as you can see this one is a little bit larger but that doesn't mean that it's going to be louder i've had a look through the specs and they've both got the same power output 2 times 1 watt they've got the same signal to noise and frequency response as well so pretty similar there are some differences between them i'll go through those in a minute but calling either of these things uh boombox seems a little bit wrong and also slightly comical i mean back in the day having a proper boom box would be something that you'd covert or value you cherish you might show off to your friends llc had a rap where he said he was walking down the street to a hardcore beat while his jvc vibrates the concrete i don't think either of these things are going to be vibrating concrete they might rattle their own speaker covers we'll find out later and of course having this badge on the front of both amazon basics that's not really something you'd want to show off to your friends i just wanted to share some snippets with you from the way these are being described in amazon's listings now both devices are made by the same company and they both share much the same feature set but it says here boom box small size big sound transform your home into an all-day party zone or kick back in style with some classic tunes and it goes on to mention that it has incredible audio and apparently both boomboxes are fitted with all the features you'd expect from a premium portable audio setup but this is a section that gets me because clearly whoever's written this has never used a cassette in their life because they say here that these boom boxes support c90 cassette tapes yeah it's compatible with c90 cassettes they must think that's what we used to call them you had cds you have vinyls and you've got c9s hey dude pass me those c90s i've just picked up some funky fresh new c90s i'm going to put some dope tunes on them but um let's uh have a look at the differences between the two and the similarities the first thing i want to talk about is the power all right starting off with a little fella looks like a handbag this underneath here if we get into this section this is the battery compartment and that takes six c cells now with this one the battery compartment is on the back and this one takes eight c cells they've both got the radio tuning dial on the right hand side it's fm only on both now this one's got auxiliary input next to that it's around the other side on that one i'll show you in a second but one thing they've done on both of them to save on cos is the tuning dial well there's no display on the front to show what frequency you're tuned to instead they've got the numbers printed on the wheel here so you look at it from above like that and you tune it in quite roughly like that so if we flip this one around to this side there's our auxiliary input and above there is a headphone output this one doesn't have a headphone output another feature on this one is an ability to play mp3s off a cd this one just plays normal compact discs although of course it is cd rw compatible and cdr as well as far as the front goes they look a little bit different but it's a similar setup they both got three buttons either side of a central display and that display will just show the track numbers for the cd and as well as the usual stop play pause track skip forward and back program repeat buttons this one also has a button to access additional folders on the cd which of course this one doesn't need but the buttons on here do perform the same functions other than that now they both got the cassette deck on the front that one's a rather slow eject looking in these they look pretty much the same mechanism as each we'll find out in a moment whether or not they're stereo and as far as the other controls go well on this one to select your source it starts off on the left with tape off fm mono fm stereo and cd slash auxiliary whereas on this one that's on the top and it starts off with auxiliary cd on the left then radio and then tape and it's got a separate switch here for fm and fm stereo that's the volume control on that one and on this one it's a wheel on the side so that pretty much covers off the differences and similarities between them let's have a listen to some music now i've turned the lights down so we get a better look at the display on this one i'm not using it with the power lead in the back here because i don't want wires hanging around i'm going to power them both off batteries while i make this video now first off we need to switch into the cd mode and i've noticed the switch around the side here of course you can't see that from the front so that's a bit annoying i suppose you get used to the positions though cd is right at the front so let's move it up to there and hopefully this thing will turn on right i hope you can see that there we've got the display coming on and i presume that's reading the cd there we go track one now the buttons on the front here oh well it started playing straight away let's just turn that down a second i was going to say the buttons on here are very difficult to read because it's shiny black plastic and the information for which button does what has been pressed into them and you can't really see it very well that's track back forward program what's that one say repeat play pause and stop right play pause is next to the end okay right let's turn it up again and have a listen [Music] okay well it worked but that's about the best i can say about it well i suppose i mean there's nothing wrong with it it didn't rattle it wasn't a weird buzz or anything but it just sounded exactly how you'd expect a cheap portable cd radio cassette to sound not very pleasant to listen to and yet you could make out what it was playing so i suppose it achieved what it meant to do let's just uh try playing one of those mp3 cds in here though just to see what happens very little i'd imagine but it's worth finding out just in case it does have an ability that they didn't document let's just see oh right play i know it's just seeing it as one track and it's not able to access it properly so yeah this one is just for normal cds cdrs that kind of thing okay let's move on to the other one okay let's switch this one on right the display is flashing there now this is a liquid crystal display with no backlight so it might be difficult for you to see that that says no on there i presume that means there's no cd so let's pop one in i'm going to use an mp3 cd oh it says op now i assume that means open so yeah just a two character display there it feels like it needs more but we'll put that in see what happens see if it can read this mp3 cd i've tried to get a better shot of that it's not worked out you can see how difficult it is to see if i put a light on it though you can see we've got nine tracks on there so let's have a listen [Music] [Music] well again just like the other one it works but i think that's about the best thing i can say about it they both treat bass as though it was one of the world's rarest commodities and it shouldn't be wasted in a boom box okay i'm going to try the cassette deck and i'm going to start off with my stereo test cassette this is just to check that both channels are being represented properly and of course the cassettes in this going that way up so therefore the tape moves from this reel to that one as it's playing and the only reason i mention that is because if i didn't i know i'd get lots of people saying why is the play button pointing the wrong direction actually i might not get that many because it's quite hard to see but it points that way i know in the past whenever i've had a machine that's set out like this people say why does a play button point to the left and similarly rewind points to the right fast forward to the left well it's just showing the way the tapes going the direction of the tape so if you ever get a deck with the cassette in this way up it's more likely they're going to put the buttons in this configuration especially one of these more modern cassette decks where they all use the same mechanism i need to move into the tape mode a bit noisy on the fast forward but we'll have a listen right left right left right left right left right left right excellent it's stereo well i say excellent so it's a small wind but we'll take it let's just try the other one oh audio file just like myself but perhaps you could spot a slight problem with the audio there maybe a little bit of a speedy irregularity let's just have another listen square right more right more right more right more right more right left right left right left right left right right well that's driving me slightly potty so we'll stop it but you could probably hear then it was getting better as it went along the speed was increasing so i think what i should do is just put a blank tape in here perhaps a 60 minute one so play through a full 30 minutes on one side before i test it again see if it's got up to the right speed at that point well so far the one that looks most like a clown is behaving least like one i've just noticed one thing i should have spotted this earlier on i feel a bit of a fool for not doing no record on the cassette on either of them so that takes out a load of tests that i was going to do makes it a lot easier but yeah they're both just cassette players not cassette recorders right let's try playing the cassette in this one though just to see how it sounds now it's picking up quite a bit of interference as things often do in here there we go got it in a better spot there so i'm going to move the camera around we'll have a listen [Music] yeah a bit of a mess to listen to that it wasn't enjoyable at all let's just fast forward to the end though because i want to see if the auto stops working on it well that works let's give the radio a try [Music] yeah it's a very familiar story with the radio it really only picks up very strong signals now if you can find one of those it will latch onto it i'm sure it's got auto frequency control in here and it will stick to it but trying to get that station in the first place is very difficult you need very fine movements of your finger to be able to catch the station as soon as you hear it you passed it it's not like a proper analog tuner where you work your way into a station and then you work your way back out the other side it's either on or off it's very hit and miss okay now this one's back from its punishment of playing a blank tape for half an hour but hopefully that has improved the speed let's have a listen what's going on what happened there i pressed something a bit too enthusiastic then it is definitely stereo though so i suppose that's a positive but yeah this one seems a little bit flaky [Music] well on the whole it's playing back tapes at the speed that it should be doing and they sound as fine as they sounded in the other one i can't really tell any difference between the two we have a hopefully got a winner coming up on the 1 million pound cash register so from the top [Music] yeah very choppy tuning again on this one although i did seem to be able to pick up a couple more stations but that might have just been luck rather than anything else i'm sure they're both using the same circuitry inside now i think we can guess that the results aren't going to be great but just for completeness sake i wanted to do a quick wow and flutter and speed test on both the boom boxes i still don't like calling them boot boxes but anyway on both the devices the problem with this one is it doesn't have a headphone output and that's the thing that i normally plug into here so instead i'd have to listen back to my tape through these speakers i'm listening to that through the microphones on here via the headphone output which is going into this i'm not confident that this is getting proper results i think there's too many steps in this chain where something could interfere with it now i've muted the audio on this section so you don't have to listen to that three kilohertz tone that i was listening to and as far as the wow and flutter goes well the needle seems to be bouncing around 0.3 percent so if that's true it is pretty wobbly but it's the speed that makes me think these measurements aren't correct as it shows that this one is running over three percent fast okay now with this one we're back to the normal method of testing i've plugged it into the headphone output on the side and the results on here well they look a bit better than the other one which again makes me think that those results weren't right but let's have a closer look so i think these results are more accurate we've got the three percent set like we had before but the needle on the other one was off the scale here it's hanging around the middle so we'll drill it down to one percent so we're looking at the top row now and the speed difference the variation well it's hanging around zero it's going down to approximately 0.5 slow there and moving its way back up to zero again so it's not maintaining a constant speed it is fluctuating and over here on the flutter one percent at the top so we're looking at the top row here and it's bouncing around 0.4 percent wear and flutter so not great results but yeah i'll discount the other ones i got because i don't trust those i think this is more representative of what these mechanisms can do and it's not great it's what you'd expect though now i'm sure if you're a subscriber to this channel you already knew the kind of results we were going to get out of these even if you haven't seen previous videos just from looking at them you can tell how bad they're going to sound and you'd be right this one on the left is a little bit better because we've got a headphone output on it so we can bypass those tinny speakers and that is fine for listening to cds or the radio if you could get it tuned in as far as the cassette goes though still a little bit too wobbly to listen to on this so not something i'd recommend of course i'm not recommending either of these i'm recommending you avoid them i just want to briefly touch on the prices because when i bought mine the smaller one was 21.51 the larger multi-colored one 65 pound 79 now i bought both because i really wanted to see what that extra 40 pound paid for at the time there were no reviews of either of them but then today when i look on amazon the one that was 65 pound is now down to 37 and one that was 21 pound is up to 65 pounds so the smaller one the one with less features now costs the most it makes absolutely no sense but then again i'm sure if you were to look again today those prices would have changed again i don't think that either of them would be worth spending your own money on and uh that's really why i make a video like this just to point out the deficiencies in something like this but then you get people say well what do you recommend instead well i don't recommend that you expect to pay 20 odd pounds for a boom box and get brilliant results they were never that cheap back in the day if you spent that amount on something back in the 80s you would have got a terrible boom box as well so yeah don't expect too much for a very small amount of money but over the last few years whenever anyone has asked me what possible stereo radio cassette i'd recommend i've suggested this one the panasonic rxd55 there's also a model further down the range which has lower level of sound output but has a much higher battery life as a result also this one's got a usb mp3 capability i think the lower down one didn't we've got a draw loading cd drive auxiliary input am fm radio but most importantly the cassette mechanism in this one they seem to have been one of the last decent quality cassette mechs i think this seems to be a panasonic mech or if it isn't at least it's one that they've specked up with higher quality components such as perhaps a metal flywheel better quality tape had better quality motor whatever it was they did to this tape mech meant that it's a lot better for playing cassettes back than any modern day boombox now i said was because that's really the reason i made this video today i wanted just to mention this because it does seem like it has now been discontinued when i reviewed this i thought that it wasn't destined to be too long for this world because it had been on the market for quite a while and it was missing some of the features that people expect nowadays such as bluetooth for example so of course panasonic have now updated the range of boom boxes on the uk website and this has now vanished but the new ones importantly have done away with the cassette deck so this mechanism here this decent quality mech it looks like this is the last we'll ever see of it so if you do want to play cassettes on a portable device like this with a decent quality of sound then maybe you should try hunting out one of these before they all disappear forever but if you don't get one of these of course well you've always got these things to pick up i'm sure there'll be things like this made for years to come this is your future of boom boxes we've got something that looks like a little handbag or something that looks like a big clown's handbag but either way they're just terrible aren't they yes it will play the audio and i suppose that's all that people bother about but if you want quality that was it but this is now your future enjoy it anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 248,676

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Amazon Basics Boombox, Review, Boombox, Boom box, stereo radio cassette, radio, cassette, stereo, ghettoblaster, CD, MP3, Cassette player, tape, C90s

Id: C5UTW7nrAnc

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021